Outlook Security Dialog and Palm

Now let me tell you, I loath this dialog as much as the next guy, however, I just discovered something appalling today.

Palm (the makers of the PDA etc) ship this application called Pocket Mirror (I think its third party?) that synchronizes Outlook with Palm handhelds like my wife’s Treo 600. I was shocked today when I watched as the dialog appeared and disappeared on my wife’s laptop. Yes, they are programmatically dismissing this dialog themselves. Rather than sign their code, or use Extended MAPI or bother to consult MSDN, they just decided, we’ll decide for the user. Nice.

Have a bit of empathy, Omar. Imagine if Microsoft was writing a PocketPC syncing app for Linux, and as a consequence of its syncing activity, some horrific dialog box pops up from the OS. Sure, it’s really an OS issue, but everyone who uses this hypothetical syncing program is going to think it’s something Microsoft is doing, and they’re going to be irritated by it. "Why can’t I sync my address book without having to dismiss a stupid dialog box! Argh! Stupid Microsoft!"

Now tell me with a straight face that Microsoft wouldn’t try to work around that platform stupidity.

I’m afraid a lot of programmers seem to have a behaviour best described as ‘path of least research’. They’ve found a way that nearly works, then they’ll take whatever the minimal route is to get to the end goal.

The irony is that they’ve usually made a rod for their own backs – it’s typically a maintenance nightmare. Trying to circumvent any feature of a system or application usually bites you in the end.